


War Dreams

by doctor_jones



Series: Down on Copperline [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, down on copperline, missing bucky, steve rogers adjusting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-17 00:24:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3508190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctor_jones/pseuds/doctor_jones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve wakes from a dream in the middle of the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the "Down on Copperline" series: scenes of Steve Rogers adjusting to life after the ice.
> 
> Find me on Tumblr at shackletons-sardines. Comments and critiques welcome - thanks for reading!

Steve had grown used to the feeling of not knowing where he was when he woke up. In the dark, he waited for the pieces to slot themselves into place.

His nose stung and tears leaked unbidden from his eyes. He swiped at them, but one ran into his ear. He laughed - thickly, ruefully. Spit flew and the tears came all the harder.

He’d been in France, Bucky at his side. The time and place were real. The cold ground beneath their backs, the warm press of one shoulder against another in the small tent. The painful awareness of it. But in his dreams, Steve was always that skinny kid from Brooklyn. In his dreams, when Bucky dropped a hand onto his in that tent, Steve knew for certain that it was on purpose.

He rolled onto his side, reached for his phone out of habit. The sobbing had quieted and the fog had lifted. It was 2014. The future. 3:15 in the morning. 

Steve replaced the phone on the nightstand and turned his back to it. Curled on his side, he slid a hand into the empty space in the sheets beside him. He spread his fingers, pressed them to the mattress. His breathing had slowed, but tears still rolled from his eyes, over the bridge of his nose, down his cheeks, disappearing into the pillow.

Sometimes it crushed him, the injustice of it. To end up here, alone, in a world free enough to promise him exactly what he wanted. In a world where the man he wanted it with was consigned to black and white photos and history book pages.  _We could have had this, Buck. We just missed it._

Man out of time, indeed.


End file.
